FSS 3-20-24

Faculty Scholar Series

Dr. Jeremy Wallach, cultural anthropologist, Department of Popular Culture

Dr. Ryan Ebright, musicologist, College of Musical Arts

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

8:00 P.M. Bryan Recital Hall
Moore Musical Arts Center

Program

Jeremy Wallach

Title: Hijabi Metal and the Perils of Overtheorization: A Tale of Academic Hubris

Abstract:
In the summer of 2023, the Indonesian thrash/funk metal trio Voice of Baceprot (VOB) seemed poised to take over the world. Barely out of their teens, the group of three hijab-clad school friends from rural West Java had just toured the United States for the first time, and, having attracted glowing write-ups in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and the international metal press (as well as receiving mentions in scholarly publications), triumphantly fulfilled the “fourth phase” of popular music globalization that I had proposed three years prior: namely the phase in which music from the Global South comes to influence the metropoles. Yet what followed VOB’s remarkable peak of career achievement was not predicted by my model, and forced me to rethink three decades’ worth of research on the Indonesian popular music industry. Instead of continuing on the path to world domination, shortly after returning from their American tour the members of VOB fired their management, cancelled a second overseas tour, and played a series of high-profile shows within Indonesia instead. In addition, the band stopped using backing tracks, embraced a less-polished sound and image, and premiered a new song that contained prominent West Javanese linguistic and traditional musical elements, which were combined with the band’s characteristic heavy rock sound.

My presentation examines this turn of events, which appears to have resulted from multiple factors, including encountering racism, sexism, and Islamophobia in Western countries. I address VOB’s self-avowed feminist politics and the metal genre’s ideological demands of expressive authenticity and transnational solidarity, and how global inequities continue to complicate those demands.

Ryan Ebright

Title: “At least as much theater as it is music”: Redefining Opera at the National Endowment for the Arts, 1976–1980

Abstract:
In the late 1970s, a fundamental question roiled the National Endowment for the Arts: what is opera? For many, the traditional answer—a predominantly musical art form, inherited from Europe, which synthesized drama, visual arts, and dance—no longer sufficed. NEA contributory experts like impresario David Gockley instead argued that opera was “a form unto itself.” In a controversial 1976 proposal to liberate opera from the NEA’s Music Program, they claimed that opera “is at least as much theater as it is music.”

The subsequent creation of the Endowment’s Opera-Musical Theater Program (OMT) in 1978 marked a historical watershed, one that I follow along a documentary trail of memos, meeting minutes, and letters. Its significance, I argue, was both social and aesthetic. American opera was transforming and coalescing as an art world, as a growing network of opera companies and service organizations reframed the genre as a form of “music theater” in response to internal and external artistic pressures.

Amid the NEA’s pivot toward non-institutionalized American artists in the mid-1970s, the U.S. opera field fortified its cultural position by redefining opera as a capacious, distinctly American, and evolving art form that encompasses multiple genres of music theater. Theory begat praxis, as OMT’s support of “New American Works” catalyzed the following decade’s operatic renaissance. This historical episode ultimately demonstrates the means and mechanisms by which art worlds emerge and transform, as individuals and institutions navigate unsettled networks of activity, aesthetics, and artworks.

Jeremy Wallach is Professor in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. A cultural anthropologist specializing in popular music and globalization, he has written or co-written over forty research essays; co-edited, with the late Esther Clinton, a special issue of Asian Music (2013); and authored the monograph Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997-2001 (Univ. of Wisconsin, 2008; Indonesian Trans., Komunitas Bambu, 2017). In 2011, he co-edited, with Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, the collection Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Duke) and in 2023 the collection Defiant Sounds: Heavy Metal Music in the Global South with Nelson Varas-Díaz, Esther Clinton, and Daniel Nevárez-Araújo (Lexington). Dr. Wallach has given research presentations in Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and throughout the United States. A founding member and former chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology Popular Music Section, Dr. Wallach serves on the editorial board of the Journal of World Popular Music Studies and is a Series Editor of the Music/Culture Series at Wesleyan University Press. His writings have appeared in Ars Lyrica, Asian Music, Ethnomusicology, Indonesia, the Journal for Cultural Research, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music History, Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse, the Journal of World Popular Music Studies, and a number of edited collections, including The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research (2020), The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (2023), The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (2024) and Theory for Ethnomusicology (Second Edition, 2019).

Ryan Ebright completed his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds a M.M. in musicology and vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. His research centers on opera, song, and intersections of music and drama, with an emphasis on 20th-century and contemporary opera, minimalism, and 19th-century Lieder. His current book project, Making American Opera after Einstein, examines the efforts of artists and institutions over the last forty years to redefine what American opera is and how audiences experience it.

Dr. Ebright presents regularly at regional, national, and international conferences. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and NewMusicBox, the journals American Music and Cambridge Opera Journal, and the book Rethinking Reich. Before coming to BGSU, Dr. Ebright taught at UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Greensboro.

Personal Website

Recent Academic Writing

“Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design.” Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 1 (2019): 85–117.

“‘We are not trying to make a political piece’: The Reconciliatory Aesthetic of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave.” In Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn, 93–109. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“Philip Glass.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online, edited by Bruce Gustafson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

“‘My answer to what music theater can be’: Iconoclasm and Entrepreneurship in Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s The Cave.” American Music 37, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 29–50. *2018 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award winner*

Recent Public Writing

“Anthony Davis’s Revolutionary Opera: ‘X’.” New Yorker, 22 May 2020.

“Finally, a Stage for Female Composers from Iran.” New York Times, 18 May 2020.

“A ‘Stabat Mater’ for the 21st Century, Colored by a Composer’s Faith.” New York Times, 1 November 2019.

“Hundreds of New Concertos Bring the World to the Concert Hall.” New York Times, 1 August 2019.

“Japanese Theater Inspires a New Opera of Celestial Textures.” New York Times, 12 November 2018.

“Beethoven’s 200-Year-Old ‘Fidelio’ Enters Today’s Prisons.” New York Times, 4 May 2018.

“Celebrating Women’s Rights, ‘That Most American Of Operas’,” New York Times, 3 November 2017.

Recent/Upcoming Presentations

“New Music Theater and American New Music Ensembles,” Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music (SAM), Minneapolis. March 2020

“Incubation and Integration: The American Music Theater Festival and Anthony Davis’s X.” Music Festival Studies: Current Perspectives, Future Directions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. March 2020.

“Assembling ‘Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble,’ 1975-86,” Minimalism Extended: The Seventh International Conference on Minimalist Music, Cardiff University, Wales. August 2019.

“Incubating American ‘Opera-Theater’: Beth Morrison Projects, Los Angeles Opera, and Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar,” SAM Annual Meeting, Kansas City. March 2018.

“Scoring the Body: Meredith Monk’s Atlas as Operatic Work,” National Meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS), Rochester. November 2017.

Courses Taught

American Opera after Einstein
Minimalism: Theory, Culture, Praxis
20th-Century Music Survey
DMA Multidisciplinary Seminar in Post-1945 Music and Culture
Chamber Music Literature
Symphonic Literature
Exploring Music

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Updated: 09/18/2024 03:50PM